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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

The difference in this case is that Ford knew about a specific issue, figured out how it could be fixed, and deliberately decided not to fix it for purely financial reasons.

Yes, the Pinto was not, in total, more dangerous than its competitors. But this was a case of egregious corporate misconduct.

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Confession: I still don't get it.

Manufacturers (and governments, for infrastructure) make a tradeoff between safety and cost all the time. You cannot make a car perfectly safe. Eventually you hit diminishing returns. This is an unavoidable fact of life.

What makes this case worse than the hundred other ones about e.g. making this structural column slightly stronger or the crumple zone this much longer, or the highway this much wider, and so on?

Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring safety all together. The socially acceptable ways to die in a car gets smaller and smaller. Things like death by gasoline fire illustrated here, or death by steering column implation[1] get reclassified from an unavoidable hazard of driving to a preventable death all the time. We've even seen steering column trauma get re-conceptualized as preventable with the passage of the Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991 and it's implementation in 1998. We'll likely see the same with deaths that are currently considered unavoidable road hazards.

The fact is that as safety technologies are developed, they have the tendency to make people reevaluate what is and isn't avoidable. As to structural columns and crumple zones, public perception might reevaluate these too. The cumulative effect is that the deaths per VMT[2] has dropped and is likely to continue to drop as advances are made. Personally I don't care so much how it's done just that it's done. It seems to be working out pretty well so far.

1. https://www.pailton.com/latest-news/collapsible-steering-col...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

I don't think that addresses my question about why this particular tradeoff was unusually objectionable, it looks to be just the general point that safety is good. But even your examples of "doing it right" are implicitly doing the same thing as the Pinto: not spending infinite resources to improve safety, but cut it off at some point.

Also, this is false, or at least, you've asserted it without basis:

>Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring safety all together.

If you have a reason why this case stands out, I'd love to learn it. If you just want to shame everyone who recognizes the inherent tradeoffs in improving safety, then I'm not sure your comment makes HN a better, more curiosity-friendly place.

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to rewrite it so that it is more curious.

If it were from a spirit of curiosity, none of those points would have been made, because you would have soon realized you're not responding to anything in my comment.

The more-curious version of your comment would be,

"That's a good point. I can't quite put my finger on what makes this particular safety/cost tradeoff different from the other cases, especially given that it maintains the same general level of safety through different decisions. Something still seems off, but I'm not at the point where I can rigorously justify it."

Does that about summarize where you stand?

>Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring safety all together.

No it doesn’t. It’s all about cost/benefit. We accept some safety risk because the alternative is a product that is too expensive to be useful.

The difference is that there are engineering standards that define what is acceptably "safe". From the article:

>"The standard requires that by 1972 all new cars can withstand a 20 mph rear-end collision without fuel loss, and by 1973 they can withstand a 30 mph collision. None of the prototype cars passed the 20 mph test."

They knew they had a design that didn't pass the industry-accepted safety standard.

Except that overall the car had the same safety, and normally HN is totally on board the argument that it's not an atrocity to neglect ossified standards if doing so finds an alternate way to accomplish the ostensible goal (here, safety).

How are the standards ossified if they are literally updated that year? Also, I think you're confusing two things. Meeting a explicit safety standards by other means is not the same as being equivalent to other vehicle safety. Ignoring regulations on the basis that your product is overall better is just not how engineering regulations work. You seem to be confusing attribution; we can't say the Pinto is safer because Ford turned a blind eye to regulation. Therefore, they are no off the hook for not ensuring regulations are met. The standard is considered the minimum safety threshold.

Consider a surgeon who, on average, has better patient outcomes. Does this absolve them from malpractice lawsuits if they are shown to ignore standards of care like washing their hands in a particular case? It's a weird logic to apply fault when there are clear standards not being met.

That Ford had to cheat to pass the mandatory government tests?

"The only Pintos that passed the test were modified in some way" says the article.

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